Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

The Lansing All-Stars were charter members of the Midwest Football League. They won the championship in 1964, their third season, but for the most part they weren’t very good, and after going 2-8 in 1966 and 2-9 in 1967 the team folded. In 1969 the All-Stars returned, presumably under new backing. T...

Looking through articles about the Midwest Football League of the 1960s and '70s, I discovered that a player I had listed as Charlie Weidemeyer (a quarterback and occasional flanker who played for Lansing from 1969-71) is actually Charlie Wedemeyer, with no I in his last name. And when one article m...

I wonder where the MWFL got the idea. Good question. It may have been simply because the kickers in that league were not very good. I just checked the line scores I have for 1967 -- just a small sample, no more than one-third or one-fourth of the games played that season -- and in those games, the ...

I stumbled across something this weekend that I’d never known before. In 1968 the Midwest Football League did something the WFL tried a few years later: It banned kicking for extra points. Teams had to run or pass; the only jobs for a kicker were field goals and kickoffs. Unlike the WFL, they kept t...

Bob Pelkington was a 6-foot-7 tight end who played college ball at Xavier (Ohio) and then spent six years (1965-70) in the Continental League and the Atlantic Coast League, the two best minor leagues of the time. In those six seasons he spent time with six different teams. Altogether he caught 159 p...

Seems like Willie Lanier must be one of them.

Yeah, I've never been able to figure out what happened to rushing offenses from 1934 to '35. In 1934, given whatever number of carries was needed to qualify, EIGHT players averaged 4.8 yards per carry or better. In 1935, that number was ONE (Ernie Caddel). Doug Russell, incidentally, averaged 5.4 in...

Sharpe getting elected could also help other players with high peak-short careers but it will be interesting if his election helps Dilweg, Lewellen and Isbell down the road? I know Isbell gets support but I feel he also could be cancelling them out as well. I feel Lewellen will only have a chance a...

From Chris Willis' book The NFL's 60-Minute Men , page80: "...Lewellen punted 84 times in 1929. The breakdown was: 1st down (24 times); 2nd down (8); 3rd down (27); and 4th down (25)." That gives us some idea of the ration of punts/down during the time in which punting was used to establi...

Is it known roughly when teams began punting for purposes like what we are used to seeing in more recent decades? It was a gradual process, without an obvious break, but I'd say the change took place from maybe 1933-48 or so -- and especially during the 1940s, as more and more teams switched from t...